Amid plummeting sales of its COVID-19 vaccines, Pfizer acquired Seagen, a biotech company that makes drugs designed to use monoclonal antibodies to deliver anti-cancer agents to tumors while limiting damage to surrounding tissue.
Pfizer last month spent $43 billion to acquire a biotech company — with projected 2023 sales of $2.2 billion — that develops cancer drugs.
Seagen, formerly Seattle Genetics, specializes in working with antibody-drug conjugate, or ADC, technology. Its primary drugs are designed to use monoclonal antibodies to deliver anti-cancer agents to tumors while limiting damage to surrounding tissue.
The deal had been in the works since early 2023, but Pfizer had to clear several hurdles in the regulatory process to address the antitrust concerns raised by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). To satisfy the FTC, Pfizer agreed to donate royalties from its existing bladder cancer drug, Bavencio, to the American Association for Cancer Research.
Prior to the acquisition, Seagen had four cancer drugs on the market — Adcetris, Padcev, Tivdak and Tukysa — approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The Bothell, Washington-based company also had several other drugs in development.
Seagen’s 2022 total sales from those drugs were just under $2 billion and its losses were $610 million.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla explained the high-price purchase to reporters in March. “We are not buying the golden eggs,” he said. “We are acquiring the goose that is laying the golden eggs.”
Bourla added that Pfizer plans to let Seagen “keep innovating” with Pfizer’s resources and that it expects Seagen products to bring in $10 billion in revenue by 2030.
The Seagen deal marks a change in focus for Pfizer, which saw its revenues skyrocket to $100.3 billion in 2022, with $56 billion of that coming from its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, the highest-selling pharmaceutical product in a single year, and Paxlovid, a COVID-19 treatment widely associated with rebound infection.
But with COVID-19 vaccine sales plummeting — for all vaccine makers — Pfizer’s share price has dropped by 42% since 2022, and its share prices are currently valued at lower than they were before the pandemic.
The Seagen acquisition doubled Pfizer’s oncology pipeline, Fierce Pharma reported, to 60 programs with nine blockbuster oncology drugs already FDA-approved. The company announced it will develop and commercialize its oncology drugs under a separate division led by Chris Boshoff, M.D., Ph.D., who had been its research and development chief.
‘Something very sinister’ about the deal
When Pfizer announced its acquisition of Seagen, online commentators were quick to point to the link between COVID-19 vaccines and rising cancer rates, namely the appearance of “turbo cancers” a term used to describe rapid-onset, aggressive cancers, often in young people, or the return of cancer post-COVID-19 vaccine in people who were cancer-free for years.
Dr. William Makis, an oncologist and cancer researcher who studies turbo cancers wrote that “something very sinister lurks in the details of this deal.”
NEW ARTICLE: Pfizer completes $43 Billion acquisition of Seagen on Dec.14, 2023 – becomes largest oncology company to treat most TURBO CANCERS caused by mRNA Vaccines – deep dive into the sinister aspects of this very bizarre deal.
Pfizer OVERPAYS $43 billion on small Cancer… pic.twitter.com/ygoHDbVZcE
— William Makis MD (@MakisMD) December 17, 2023
Bioscience researcher David Wiseman, Ph.D., told The Defender that with existing data, it isn’t possible to draw a direct connection between Pfizer’s pivot to cancer treatment and vaccine side effects.
However, he said, the growing number of reports of cancers linked to the vaccine, the safety signals for cancers within the public health agencies’ own data, the total lack of research by both Pfizer and Moderna into the carcinogenic effects of the vaccines, and other key information about the mRNA shots in the scholarly literature make further investigation of that link imperative.
“There’s a lot of data on cancers and all-cause mortality in general of varying quality,” he said. “Someone needs to get good quality data and go through it in a systematic way to get to the bottom of it.”
“The optics of Pfizer saying, ‘So now we’re in the oncology business’ are certainly not good,” Wiseman said. “And if they are willing to spend $40 billion on it, I think they could put a couple of those dollars aside to do the studies that really need to be done — the long-term studies on cancer-related issues to do with COVID-19 vaccines.”
Oncology market booming
The global oncology drug market size is projected to skyrocket in the next several years. Allied Market Research estimates it will grow from $135 billion in 2020 to more than $274 billion in 2030. IQVIA estimates the market will be valued at $375 billion by 2027, and Statista projects a market value of over $359 billion by 2028.
This potential market growth comes as several Big Pharma companies are facing a “looming patent cliff” The Wall Street Journal reported, with $200 billion in annual sales going off-patent this decade. Companies are competing with one another for desirable biotech companies and drugs. Several pharmaceutical companies are investing heavily in ADC drugs and other cancer treatments.
AbbVie announced in November it was paying $10.1 billion to acquire ImmunoGen, maker of the ovarian cancer treatment Elahere, which received accelerated approval from the FDA in 2022.
Bristol Myers Squibb in December 2023 announced an $800 million upfront deal with SystImmune for an ADC candidate currently in Phase 2 trials.
Johnson and Johnson announced Monday that it will acquire ADC drug developer Ambrx and its pipeline of targeted cancer drugs for $2 billion.
Merck paid $4 billion in October 2023 to license three ADC drugs from Daiichi Sankyo to treat various cancers. Fierce Pharma noted this acquisition puts ADC drugs at the center of Merck’s “post-Keytruda future.” Its blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda will lose market exclusivity in 2028, meaning generic versions will start to be produced.
Merck also continues to “enhance [its] oncology pipeline through strategic acquisitions,” it said when it announced Tuesday that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Harpoon Therapeutics, which has a portfolio of cancer immunotherapy drugs in development, for approximately $680 million.
Growing evidence COVID shots link to cancers must be investigated
Experts are seeing a growing body of evidence linking the shots to a variety of cancers and many have been calling for more investigation into the issue.
Most recently, Kevin McKernan, chief scientific officer and founder of Medicinal Genomics and his colleagues identified host cell DNA fragments in the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA shots.
Scientists studying the vaccines found bacterial DNA left over from the microscopic plasmids used for multiplying DNA in the mRNA vaccine manufacturing process.
McKernan said that annotating Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine sequence with a simple online tool reveals the presence of DNA from simian virus 40 (SV40), a known cancer promoter.
He said this raises concerns that the plasmid DNA could lead to cancers or autoimmune issues in some vaccine recipients.
This discovery was so concerning that Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, M.D., Ph.D., called for a “halt in the use of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines” over safety concerns after reporting the FDA failed to adequately respond to his inquiry into the issue.
Evidence of a possible link between the shots and cancers first emerged publicly in 2022. Pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole who runs Cole Diagnostics, an independent medical laboratory in Garden City, Idaho, began seeing a rise in rates of aggressive cancers such as endometrial cancer shortly following the vaccine rollout, he told Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) Brian Hooker, Ph.D., on a 2022 episode of CHD.TV’s “Doctors & Scientists.”
Cole said when he testified in a Senate committee in February 2022 with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a whistleblower came forward with the epidemiology database for the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), which showed an uptick in various cancers.
Cole said the DOD then “froze” the epidemiology database and altered four to five years of data, an act which will inevitably generate “legal wranglings and investigations,” The Defender reported.
A recent report by Edward Dowd based on data from the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics shows an unprecedented increase in cancer deaths among 15- to 44-year-olds following the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines.
Dowd, author of “‘Cause Unknown’: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022,” and his co-researchers examined all International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, (ICD-10) codes for cause of death in the U.K. in the study period of 2010-2022 to investigate trends in “malignant neoplasms,” or malignant tumors.
They found the rate of cancer deaths in 2022 among people ages 15-44 showed a strong signal for mortality from cancer that began in 2021 and accelerated in 2022.
In the report, Dowd underscored the fact that this research was “a first attempt to bring out some patterns that are observed in trends” in cancer post-2020 and called for researchers to further investigate the issue.
Makis has tracked and analyzed the rise in the post-jab “turbo cancers,” reporting the emergence of rapid-growing cancers of the breast, colon, esophagus, kidney, liver, pancreas, bile duct, brain, lung and blood — including exceedingly rare types of cancer.
His work includes several case reports. One of those case reports, co-written by Dr. Peter McCullough, described the rapid deterioration of a 56-year-old man who within days of his COVID-19 shot developed Bell’s palsy, which progressed into an aggressive tumor on his ear and face.
A number of case reports of rapid-onset cancers have been filed by different researchers. Another example, published in November 2021, described the remarkably rapid progression of angioimmunoblastic T cell lymphoma in a 66-year-old man, mere days after he got his third Pfizer shot.
According to Makis, such progression ought to take years, or at least months.
The mechanisms behind what causes these “turbo cancers” or any cancers linked to COVID-19 mRNA shots are unclear. Makis and others have hypothesized several possible mechanisms. The prevailing hypothesis focuses on the modification of the mRNA used in the vaccines, which is different from the mRNA found in the virus.
The modified mRNA in the vaccine has been manipulated through a process called “codon optimization,” where some of the nucleotides are swapped out to stabilize the RNA and prevent rapid breakdown.
But when that is done, the resulting protein can be easily misfolded, possibly contributing to chronic diseases or suppressing innate immune surveillance.
Wiseman told The Defender there were also several other possible mechanisms. One could be the SV40 promoter in the DNA contaminants, about which he co-authored a paper, available as a preprint, with McKernan. He said the genomic integration of the modified RNA through reverse transcription could also be a mechanism, or the spike protein itself could be linked to cancers.
He said more research is needed to confirm whether such a link exists and the mechanisms behind it.
He told The Defender that neither Pfizer’s nor Moderna’s mRNA vaccines had even been evaluated for their potential to cause cancer. Both Spikevax’s and Corminaty’s inserts explicitly state they have “not been evaluated for the potential to cause carcinogenicity, genotoxicity, or impairment of male fertility.”
Vaccine makers justify this failure to investigate the vaccines’ carcinogenicity by referring to the 2005 World Health Organization guidelines on nonclinical evaluation of vaccines, which indicate vaccines typically don’t need these studies.
The problem, Wiseman said, is that those guidelines were created for antigenic vaccines. They also indicate that if there is reason to believe there may be a carcinogenic link, it ought to be studied.
In addition to all of the evidence enumerated here, Wiseman said, there are several safety signals for cancer in the government data itself.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s proportional reporting ratios (PRR) analysis of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, database — which the agency was forced to release through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits — showed a safety signal for cancer.
PRR analysis compares the proportion of different types of adverse events reported for a new vaccine to the proportion of those events reported for an older, established vaccine to determine if a safety signal is present.
A safety signal indicates a condition may be linked to a vaccine but requires further analysis to confirm an association.
Wiseman and several colleagues submitted their own VAERS analysis to the National Academies Committee tasked in March with reviewing relevant adverse events associated with COVID-19 vaccines.
They found an excess of cancer signals for COVID-19 vaccines compared to all other vaccines for all years beginning in 1990, providing more evidence to support the CDC’s similar findings.
That is in addition to safety signals for numerous other adverse events, also identified by the CDC.
And although the FDA continues to stonewall Freedom of Information Act requests for its analysis of the VAERS data, a CDC spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email that its PRR were “generally consistent” with the empirical Bayesian data mining done by the FDA.
All of these signals indicate, Wiseman said, “there is plenty to be concerned about.”